Our Approach

A systems approach to K-12 workplace wellbeing in Canadian education.

What is
Well at Work?

Why
Well at Work?

K-12 staff have a significant role to play in supporting students’ wellbeing and academic success. However, K-12 staff experience stress and burnout at a greater rate than in other professions. This not only impacts their own health, but also their students’ wellbeing and academic success – leading to significant costs for school districts, recruitment challenges, and reduced workplace morale.

Well at Work aims to…

↓ Stress

Reduce stress, burnout, and disability due to mental health problems among K-12 staff across Canada’s schools and school districts.

↑ Wellbeing

Build capacity in education leaders to develop their own unique approaches that will improve workplace wellbeing, reduce financial costs, and create more positive working and learning environments.

While many school districts have invested in stress reduction programs and policies to help staff cope with daily systemic pressures beyond their control, these positive innovations remain a patchwork of success. The influence of working conditions on staff wellbeing – and the ramifications this can have on student outcomes – is often overlooked, leading to one-off interventions focused on individual cases rather than the systemic approaches that transform entire education systems for the better. It’s a common case of tackling the symptoms rather than the disease.

A Shared Responsibility

No one person or group can “fix” workplace wellbeing. It is a shared responsibility among individual employees, the schools and school districts that employ them, and the unions/associations that support them. It can be helpful to frame this shared responsibility around individual, collaborative and systemic actions.

Individual Actions

Individual Actions are actions that employees can take to cope with stress, practice self-care, and interact with colleagues in a respectful, supportive way. For example:

Taking care of your own wellbeing by getting regular exercise and enough sleep, eating right, managing screen time, and maintaining strong social connections.
Welcoming new colleagues, checking in with, or offering help to colleagues you’re concerned about.

Individual actions improve personal resilience and contributes to a caring, supportive workplace. While individual actions are important, these actions alone do not address the root causes of stress, and their benefits can be mitigated by a chronically stressful workplace environment.

Collaborative Actions

Collaborative actions are those that groups of employees can do to make the workplace more supportive of wellbeing. For example:

Groups of employees starting walking groups, book clubs or organizing social events;
Starting an Inquiry Group or other professional learning experience that allows for greater staff collaboration.

Collaborative actions create a healthier workplace context, increase sense of psychological safety, and improve collaboration among staff while also addressing specific issues of staff wellbeing.

What are Health Champions and School Health Teams?

‘Health Champions’ and ‘School Health Teams’ play a key role in building a healthy school community for both staff and students using the principles of the Comprehensive School Health approach.

Positive mental health is “the capacity of each and all of us to feel, think, act in ways that enhance our ability to enjoy life and deal with the challenges we face. It is a positive sense of emotional and spiritual well-being that respects the importance of culture, equity, social justice, interconnections and personal dignity.”¹

Health Champions are school staff and other members of the school community who have an interest in making school a healthier place, and may already be taking part in well-being initiatives. These individuals are not necessarily well-being experts, but rather have a passion for driving whole-school health and wellbeing forward, and understand the importance of this investment. Health Champions take on roles such as:

Raising awareness about wellbeing in the school community, and acting as wellbeing advocates within their school and school district
Acting as key contact persons for external partners and stakeholders, such as government or community health organizations

School Health Teams are staff and school community members who focus more closely on planning and implementing a wellbeing vision and action plan for the school community. School Health Teams take on roles such as:

Providing direction and leadership for wellbeing initiatives in the school community
Identifying key priorities by consulting with school community members and developing an action plan to address those priorities.²

Systemic Actions

Systemic actions are those that school districts can do to create a workplace that prioritizes staff wellbeing. For example:

Allocating funding directly to staff wellbeing initiatives
Adopting innovative wellbeing practices and processes that support staff wellbeing, such as limiting email responses.
Addressing workload issues identified by staff in schools and other district work sites.
Form a district wellbeing team or committee to help identify key issues affecting mental wellbeing and give employees a voice in developing solutions.

Systemic actions provide the necessary mandate and resources for schools to address staff wellbeing in a sustainable way.

To achieve success, Well at Work intervenes at all three levels, each one complementing the others, because no single approach can resolve this complex issue.

Our Approach

What is Well at Work?

Why Well at Work?